French embassy - Ambassade de France
| RSSScience and Technology
From Pasteur to the Channel tunnel
France and Britain have long maintained strong relations in the field of science and technology, which have yielded internationally recognized advances and spectacular achievements, of which the Channel Tunnel is only the most recent example. There have been also been many other indisputable successes, some of which are perhaps less well-known to the general public, such as the major contribution Louis Pasteur made to the development of modern British brewing with his discovery of the micro-organism causing the problems affecting the production of beer.
France and Britain are both partners in the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), European Space Agency (ESA), Joint European Taurus (JET) programme and the EUREKA European industrial research programme. Within the EU, over 1,500 Anglo-French research projects are being carried out under its R&D programmes.
Many cooperation agreements have been signed between the two countries’ research centres and universities and there are links between their professional bodies: French members are elected to the Royal Society and Britons to the Académie des Sciences. More than 200 inter-university agreements have been concluded between the two countries, although in fact far more students and researchers come to the UK from France than vice versa - over 20% of French students’ post-doctoral placements in Europe are in Britain.